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Pte. Owen Arthur Owen
British Army 1st Battalion King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment
from:Highbury, Islington
(d.29th May 1918)
As a printer-compositor, Arthur Owen had been in a reserved occupation, but with losses mounting on the Western Front, he was called up, went to France and never returned, leaving a widow, Lou and two young children, Gladys (my mother) and Harold. Arthur is buried in Le Vertannoy British Cemetery, Hinges, near Béthune in Northern France. The small walled cemetery, with its cross, a single tree, and 141 identical gravestones, lies in one corner of a potato field (‘some corner of a foreign field, That is for ever England’ – Rupert Brooke). Having survived the appalling slaughter of the ferocious enemy offensive of April 1918 during the Battles of the Lys, Arthur was killed in action during a surprise enemy attack on his company’s position on the night of 28-29 May 1918. Three of Arthur’s King’s Own Royal Lancaster comrades were killed that same day, and are buried alongside him: 30489 (Frederick) Harold Mitchell, 22925 M Holman and 34751 F. Longworth, together with a fourth, 202305 H. Frost, who died two days later.
Arthur’s mother had been born Janet Greenhill in 1856 in a family of rope-makers in Perth, Scotland; his father, Albert Owen, had come from a long, prolific, colourful and unruly line of canal boatmen in Oxfordshire, Warwickshire and finally Buckinghamshire, where he married Janet in 1885. I am still at a loss to explain how they met; in 1881 Janet was a Cook in a household in Forfarshire. By 1891 Albert and Janet had moved to Eastbourne, where he was a Beach Photographer (with a prime licensed pitch right by the pier). In 1911 Arthur and his young wife Lou (both born in 1886) were lodging with a family in Highbury; my one-year-old mother was being looked after by her mother’s parents in Tunbridge Wells. Janet died in 1911, and so was spared the loss of her eldest son; Albert died in Eastbourne in 1931. After Arthur’s death, Lou, Gladys and Harold went back to live with Lou’s parents in Tunbridge Wells. In 1923 Lou gave birth to a daughter, Jean; early in the Second World War Jean, who had joined the Land Army, was driving her tractor home at the end of a day’s work when it overturned, leaving her permanently paralysed on one side; despite this, she later married and had a daughter, who in her turn married and is now a proud grandmother.
Visiting Arthur’s grave for the first time in July 2012, I signed the Visitors’ Book, in which the mayor of Hinges, every 11 November, signs his name in remembrance of the fallen. I was filled with the peace of a gloriously sunny late afternoon, with bitter sadness at Arthur’s loss and all it had meant to the lives of his dependants – but also with a sense of triumph at having, at last, found Arthur. ‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them’ - Robert Laurence Binyon.
